Free Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins

“What kind of stuff walking the side of the road?”
    “Let’s jest forget it.” Mike summoned the bartender from her jihad on flyspecks, ordered another round of Coors, and offered the opinion that Uncle Sam ought to just wade in and take the oil fields away from the Arabs and be done with it. “Not that I favor the Jews over the Arabs, they’re both lower than the tits on a sow, far as I’m concerned. But we ought to stop the terrorism and take the damn oil.”
    Mike really didn’t want to discuss foreign policy, but how could he sit there and tell anybody that his sister had seen a seashell that morning walking alongside a country road? And a fork or a spoon. And a red stick and a sock. A sock, for Christ’s sake! And what looked like a can of beans.
    THERE ARE LANDSCAPES in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour (the wispiest little pasta of cloud can spoil the effect), our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection to space becomes as solid as bone.
    Near that raised stitchery on the map where the quilt scraps of Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming are sewn together, Can o’ Beans rested in the twilight, taking in, and being taken in by, an overflowing vault that was not so much sky as space.
    It was the end of their first day’s journey but also the beginning of their first night’s journey. Following the events of the morning—the tipsy woman who almost wrecked her pickup truck when she spotted them along the highway, the hunters who fired at them (thinking them rabbits or what?) not long after they moved away from the road and into the countryside—Painted Stick and Conch Shell had decided to take Can o’ Beans’s original advice, which had been to travel by night. Painted Stick was naive even to consider that their band of objects might, with impunity, move across America in broad daylight. Welcome to the modern world, Painted Stick.
    Having spent the afternoon hiding in a tiny arroyo, they would soon be under way again, and now Can o’ Beans stood on the gully’s lip, looking past a darkening sky into the dominions of stillness and grace. With a serene, if tinny, shiver, he/she centered him/herself at that spatial crossroads where Intimacy and Elsewhere intersect, and reviewed from a philosophical vantage, the strange situation in which he/she found him/herself.
    CONCH SHELL HAD BEEN first out of the niche. She had dropped in such a manner that she landed on the hard tip of her spire, thereby avoiding any cracking or chipping of her body or lips. For a second, she had stuck there in the cave floor’s soil, balanced upright on her spire. Then, slowly, she had fallen over to rest on the low ridges of her body whorls. She had lain like an odalisque, lounging upon her whorled side, affording an unobstructed and, perhaps, immodest view of her tannish outer lip, her creamy inner lip, and the heavenly pinks of her opening, her aperture.
    To Can o’ Beans and Dirty Sock, who had been expecting something scaly and wired, the pink glow of Conch Shell was heavenly indeed. Can o’ Beans thought she might have been the most lovely thing he/she had ever seen. He/she issued a sigh that spun every single bean in his/her sauce. Dirty Sock whistled in the style of a construction worker and called, “Hey now, hey now, foxy lady!” or something like that.
    As for Spoon, she registered such a pang of jealousy that it very nearly turned her as green as if she had spent a night in mayonnaise.
    The conch shell is the voice of Buddha, the birth-bed of Aphrodite, the horn that drives away all demons and draws lost mariners home from the sea. Colored by the moon, shaped by the primal geometry, it is the original